A blue-ribbon panel of scientific and technology advisers to President Obama warns that the nation risks losing its longstanding supremacy in food production because research in agriculture has not kept up with new challenges like climate change, depleted land and water resources and emerging pests, pathogens and invasive plants.

The president’s Council of Advisers on Science and Technology, chaired by John P. Holdren, director of the White House office of science and technology policy, and Eric Lander, president of the Broad Institute of Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, urged a commitment of $700 million in additional money for new agricultural research — but deployed in very different ways than the money that is currently doled out.

“Our most important conclusion is that our nation’s agricultural research enterprise is not prepared to meet the challenges that U.S. agriculture faces in the 21st century,” the panel states in its report, which was issued on Friday.

The report lays out seven challenges ranging from competition for water to the impacts of climate change and biofuels production on food yields. “The need to deal with these growing challenges in agriculture, including new pests and pathogens, controlling agriculture’s environmental impact, health and nutritional concerns and international food security underscores the importance of agricultural research to the health, prosperity and security of the nation,” they wrote.

But the panel found that federal money for agricultural research has, in real dollars, remained roughly the same for the last 30 years, according to the report, while financing for research in other areas of science and technology has risen strikingly.

Moreover, because so little of the money is awarded competitively, the report’s authors concluded, it is not spurring innovation and is often duplicating research being done by private companies. Excluding recent research on biofuels production, less than $500 million per year is available for competitive grants in agriculture, the report said. That amounts to roughly 2 percent of the competitive funding from the National Institutes of Health and 6 percent of that from the National Science Foundation,” the panel wrote.

“One consequence of the small amount of competitive funding for agriculture research is the decline in training of new agriculture scientists and the hindered recruitment of a new generation of the best young scientists into this area,” the study said.

The Department of Agriculture is the largest federal grantor of funds for agricultural research, but roughly 66 percent of what it distributes stays in-house to finance its own research units like the Agricultural Research Service and the Economic Research Service — roughly double the amount that other federal agencies retain for research purposes.

Additionally, some of the research dollars that the department distributes through land grant universities is used for permanent faculty salaries, which the report found “could unintentionally dissuade researchers from the challenging work of performing at the cutting edge of science and ultimately producing novel, innovative research.”

The bulk of research money is spent on a handful of commodity crops, particularly corn and soybeans, for which private companies enlist battalions of highly educated plant breeders, geneticists, laboratory technicians and other skilled workers in research and development.

The report also underscores how deeply agriculture meshes with energy, health, environmental and even national security issues. For instance, the panel noted that despite the nation’s growing reliance on biofuels, little research has been done on the impact that droughts and other extreme weather might have on the nation’s energy supply.

It also noted the growth of interest in the role of food in human health and well-being, including growing problems like obesity and diabetes. “As part of the public investment in agricultural research, funding should be provided to explore how plant and animal products can be used or modified to respond to this crisis in nutrition and health by developing new varieties of food products and new approaches to food processing,” the panel wrote.

The group also called for the proposed $700 million in new money for agricultural research to be distributed through a competitive process and that a portion be used to ensure that some of the nation’s most talented graduate students and post-doctoral researchers take part.

Original Post

USDA Response

To the Editor:

“U.S. Agricultural Research Is Faltering, Report Warns” (Green blog, nytimes.com, Dec. 10) sheds light on a pressing issue: the urgent need to finance agricultural research. But as the Agriculture Department’s chief scientist, I disagree with the characterization that our research is faltering.

Agricultural science has led our country to be the global leader in feeding the world. It has also returned more than $10 to our economy for every $1 invested in research. Continued innovation and investment are critical to maintaining our leadership and our competitive edge.

Our research is focused on the grand challenges of the 21st century — providing food security while meeting other demands placed on agriculture for fiber, fuel and other feedstocks; preserving natural resources; and adapting to climate change — and on fostering a culture of open science internationally.

Despite financial constraints, the quality of our work remains of high quality and value.

CATHERINE WOTEKI
Washington, Dec. 14, 2012

The writer is under secretary for research, education and economics at the Agriculture Department.

By Bryan Walsh   Dec. 11, 2012

Climate activists need to take their victories where they can. There was little success to celebrate at the U.N. climate summit in Doha, Qatar, which concluded over the weekend. Delegates agreed to extend the expiring Kyoto Protocol by a few years — albeit without the participation of previous signatories like Japan and Russia, which really left only Australia and most of the developed economies of Europe. The U.S. — which never ratified Kyoto to begin with — offered little on its own, and developed nations put off resolving a debate over the promise of providing tens of billions in climate aid to poor nations. Delegates agreed to finalize a new, wider global pact on climate change by 2015 that would take effect by 2020 — but furnished no real details on what that agreement would actually do. Even by the low standards of the U.N. climate process, Doha was a disappointment.

That’s one reason climate activists are focusing their efforts closer to home — particularly on America’s colleges and universities. Thanks to the efforts of the writer turned activist Bill McKibben‘s 350.org, students at schools around the country are pushing university administrators to sell off any investments in fossil fuel companies from collegiate endowment funds. The strategy is called divestment, and if it sounds familiar, it’s because student activists used the same method — mostly successfully — to push universities to stop investing in apartheid-era South Africa during the 1980s. One school, Unity College in Maine, has already taken action to dump its fossil fuel investments, and the campaign is active in more than 150 other U.S. colleges and universities. “In the near future, the political tide will turn and the public will demand action on climate change,” wrote Stephen Mulkey, the Unity College president, in a letter to other college administrators. “Our students are already demanding action, and we must not ignore them.”

(MORE: Why Global Fuel Prices Will Spark the Next Revolutions)

The money at stake in the divestment fight could be significant: colleges and universities have endowments worth more than $400 billion, depending on fluctuations in the market. While there’s no way of knowing how much of that goes to fossil fuel companies like Exxon or Shell, those firms do represent a large portion of the stock market, representing nearly 10% of the value of the Russell 3000, a broad index of 3,000 American companies.

But the divestment fight is less about money than it is about the moral status of the fossil fuel industry. By calling on universities to divest themselves of oil, gas and coal companies, student activists are trying to draw an equivalency between a what is now a widely-acknowledged social evil — an apartheid regime — and a fossil fuel industry that sells the products that are chiefly responsible for manmade global warming. To McKibben and his allies, the fossil fuel industry is the new tobacco — and should be treated as such, as he told the Huffington Post in a recent interview:

Our criteria is that it’s okay to invest in companies so long as they stop lobbying in Washington, stop exploring for new hydrocarbons, and sit down with every one else to plan to keep 80 percent of the reserves in the ground. We just need to change the power balance. They’re making so much money. The popular notion is that Americans are addicted to fossil fuels but I find that’s not true; most people would be happy to power their lives with anything else. The addicts are the big fossil fuel companies that are just fatally addicted to the level of profit they are able to deduce. They can’t help themselves you know — so we’re going to have help them.

(MORE: The New Oil and Gas Boom)

While Unity College has led the way on divestment, so far there’s little evidence that other colleges and universities are eager to follow suit, though some institutions like Tufts University in Massachusetts are at least considering calls for divestment. No school with an endowment greater than $1 billion has agreed to divest so far, and Harvard University — which has the nation’s largest endowment at $31 billion and happens to be McKibben’s alma mater — has said that it won’t divest, even though 72% of Harvard undergraduates voting in recent campus elections supported a call to ask the school to do so.

In some ways it’s not completely fair for student activists to focus on the fossil-fuel investments of their schools, given that colleges and universities are doing more to combat climate change and go green than just about any other institution in the country. More than 600 U.S. schools are part of the American College and University Presidents’ Climate Commitment, under which signatories agree to complete a greenhouse gas emissions inventory and take immediate steps to reduce carbon output. But at the same time, American universities aren’t shy about holding themselves to a still-higher standard when it comes to progressive causes — and for many college students today, there’s no cause greater than fighting climate change. University presidents who don’t fall in line should get used to hearing protests outside their offices. Just like their forerunners in the apartheid battles of the 1980s, these climate activists won’t stop until they win.

MORE: Climate Change: Polar Ice Sheets Melting Faster, Raising Sea Levels

By LISA W. FODERARO